In May I shared with all of you that we were expecting our first child. I didn’t realize then that it would mean the ultimate decline in my ability to play the game that I have grown to love.

On November 27, 2013 at 1:34 pm my son Zack entered into the world. He was 5 pounds and 15 ounces or total squishy goodness. On December 1st, 2013, after spending a few extra days in the hospital because he couldn’t regulate his own blood sugar, we brought him home. If you check my twitter there are TONS of pictures of our little Frostling.

I’ve decided to share with you the top 5 things that every raid leader should know about a WoW Momma.

5. Our attendance isn’t always the greatest.

When I was pregnant with my son I told myself that I would still make it to every single raid and stay the entire time. Yeah.. that was a joke. Not only did I fall asleep in raid regularly including during boss fights, but I often just couldn’t get there on time. Between working and being sick I just couldn’t do it or stay the whole time. Now that my son is here I have made it to one raid and managed to stay for 2 hours before having to go. And the funny thing is that I could have stayed longer because my son was sleeping. I was falling asleep in my chair so decided to call it a night.

4. We take frequent breaks.

Us WoW Momma’s have to take extra breaks. Whether that’s to go to the bathroom, prepare a feeding, pump, feed the baby, change a diaper, or my favorite clean up projectile vomit. We are busy ladies and not all of us have the help of someone else. In my case I’m going to come right out and say that I am a proud breastfeeding mom. My journey has been a little different and my son just never got a handle on latching. Because of that I am an EP (exclusive pumping) breastfeeding mom. What that means is that I need to hook myself up to my handy dandy breast pump and get that yummy goodness out of my breasts for him to eat it. My son is then bottle fed my milk. He is happy and healthy and still gets liquid gold. I can try to plan my pumping around raiding but most of us have to pump or feed our baby at least every 2 to 3 hours.

3. We can’t stop talking about our kids.

Let’s face it, how many of us when asked how our kids are tend to ramble off their latest measurements, favorite toys, and the color of their last poop? *shrinks back into the corner* Okay so I’ve been guilty of most of those things. I can’t log on as much as other people so when I do I feel like I have to tell everyone all the latest and greatest updates from our life as it pertains to the Frostling. If I promise to keep it relevant will you promise to ask me during a break how he or she is doing? You will? Okay thanks.

2. Please try to give us a chance.

I know that we’ve been away for awhile and our gear probably isn’t the greatest. But we would love it if you would give us an opportunity to kill something. I’m not talking about throwing us in on a heroic progression boss attempt. Maybe you could put us in on the trash or on a boss that is on farm. It makes us still feel like a member of the team.

1. Raiding isn’t our top priority.

Raiding used to be the most important thing in my life and then I met my husband. Now that I have a beautiful little squishy baby in my life he has become my top priority. As a raid leader you need to understand that if I say “my son is crying, I need to go” that you don’t give me guff about it or try to make me feel bad for leaving early. You also need to understand that my family now comes first and asking me to stay late just isn’t an option anymore. Raiding can still be a priority for some people even after having children. It is just important for raid leaders to be respectful and know that family has to come first.

I hope that you have enjoyed this posting. I would encourage all raid leaders to be caring and compassionate and very understanding as a WoW Momma makes the transition back into the game. Please don’t pile on the pressure or try to get us to come back earlier than we had planned. And if coming back to raiding just doesn’t work out, please don’t judge us or say that we’ve “thrown our raiding career away.” We have a more important job on our hands: we are the mothers to the next generation of gamers. We have a responsibility to raise them up right and teach them the ways of the World of Warcraft!

I wanted to take a moment and share with you the episode of The Let’s WoW Podcast that I appeared on a few months ago. Towards the end of August I was invited on to help celebrate my dear friend Ghemit’s 4th annual 25th birthday.

I had an absolute blast sitting around and chatting with a great group of people. We laughed so hard until we cried. You can find a link to this episode here.

I wanted to share with you something super exciting. Yesterday I had the opportunity to join Hasteur and Gulvan on the latest episode of Group Quest. We sat around the table and had a great chat about topics ranging from raiding to pet battles. No topic was off the table.

It felt so good to be able to podcast again and to get my thoughts out there for the community to enjoy. I would like to thank Hasteur for inviting me to be on the show.

Figured I would post a little something and welcome you to the new site. After taking several months away to have a baby I’ve decided to start blogging again. So welcome to the new home of The Elizabella Chronicles.

That’s a great question… It’s been awhile almost a month since my last posting. I’ve been very busy with work and other things outside of the game. This has cut down on my ability to play WoW and raid like I used to.

The great thing is that my husband and I have found out that we are having a BOY!! Below you’ll see a super cute ultrasound picture of our son. We will be naming him Zack and can’t wait until he joins our family in early December.

Between now and Zack’s arrival I will be trying to write a lot of new postings about some of my experiences and some new features that are coming in patch 5.4 and beyond.

I also wanted to share with you all that there is a new podcast show and/or segment in the works that will be about the Gaming Mommy. Stay tuned for more information and an official announcement coming soon.

Roleplay, or RP, is one of the many ways you can show your own creativity in the World of Warcraft. Transmogging might be the hip new thing, but RP in Azeroth has been around since the launch of the game and has led to some of the most memorable events in my own time in Azeroth, and many others. I am here to bring you five tips on what to do to be a good citizen of an RP server, whether you actively RP or not. Please note, RP to some may only be Erotic Role Play, or ERP, but for most RPers, this is a small portion of their RP story, or a type of RP they have no interest in. Please do not paint all RPers with the same tar stained brush!

Be Respectful

No one likes someone who is immature and tries their hardest to ruin other people’s fun. Why be that person? Maybe you aren’t into RP, and that’s fine. There is a pretty wide line between not participating in RP and being a jerk to others who do. Jumping around when there is an event going on, doing rude emotes, or even taking advantage of PvP flagging to attack participants is a sure fire way to get a lot of people to be mad at you.

If you want to watch the RP going on, in most cases this is fine. Maybe it will encourage you to dip your toe in the water. If not, just go about your business and leave those who like RP to their chosen pastime in Azeroth. Even if you do decide to dip a toe in the RP pond, as long as you are respectful and willing to listen to those with more experience, you can go a long way to perhaps someday enjoying it yourself.

Do Not Break Other’s Roleplay

Much in the same vein as the first one, don’t do stuff to break a people’s RP. What this means is doing something intentionally that would interfere or break the RP of others. Being rude is the smallest form of this, such as speaking when carefully scripted events are going on, but it gets even bigger. Using real world(RL) terms in say, yell or emotes is a violation of the rules on RP servers. Doing this during someone’s RP is very frustrating and can easily shatter the RP going on.

To the extreme of the breaking of RP, I have seen people crash RP funerals from the opposing faction, seen dozens of naked as can be females and males show up in the Cathedral of Light to crash a wedding, I have seen people pop a picnic basket in the middle of people discussing critical story events in their RP and more. Please, folks, do not be these people. Be respectful and you will get respect back. Be a troll and you just might find yourself killed by a kind GM, or teleported to far off lands.

Do Not Be A God

If you do decide to actively roleplay, please do not act like a god. Anyone who has read fiction will tell you that is it one of the biggest annoyances in literature, and equally as frustrating in RP. If someone kills you in RP, your character dies in the story. Do not be the Lazarus of your realm’s RP community. You can participate in other stories, in other RP lines, there are usually a few divergent or even completely separate stories going on for a server, so there may be a place for a deceased character in one story to join in on another.

However, do not be that person who kills people off all the time. No one wants to roleplay with some who constantly plays a psychopath, and ruins the story by coming in and killing everyone. Much like no one liking a god-mode junkie, no one likes a mass murderer. When you kill the player, you harm the story that is unfolding.

Do Not Cause Useless Drama

I know, it sounds preposterous to tell people to stop causing drama in a played out drama. Sort of asking a hockey player(Go Jets!) to stop scoring so much. There is a huge difference, though, between playing out the story, and making drama that is not needed. There is good drama, like a story that comes off perfectly, and everyone playing their parts to perfection, and someone who messes with the story, changes the events and their role, just to either feed their own ego, or to mess with someone else’s fun. Doing so is another way to ensure that no one wants to invite you to the next event or story.

Have Fun!

The most important thing about RP, folks, is to have fun. Want your character to speak like a mix of Tauren wisdom and gnomish energy? Do it. Want your character to have an impulse to dance on every table she comes across? Have at it. Want your character to act like a roman senator? Ok then. Just have fun, and enjoy the time you spend with your fellow roleplayers, and don’t take yourself too seriously. It is, after all, still just a game.

Bonus: Be Careful of ERP

Ahh, yes, I am sure many of you have heard of this. ERP, or Erotic Role Play, is the act of roleplaying erotic or sexual situations. No doubt you have heard about this in connection to the realm Moon Guard, hell the Lion’s Pride Inn in Goldshire on that realm has its own WoW Wiki page! I personally feel that each person’s RP is their own business, as long as it doesn’t affect me. Approaching someone and offering lewd favors, if you are RPing a prostitute might be ok, but it is better to make sure the person wants to be involved. Using addons, one can absolutely flag themselves as interested in such things, and that is all it takes to really guarantee you are not soliciting up the wrong tree.

Likewise, if you are approached, be firm but respectful in advising you are not interested. There are a number of people who think that 99% of RP is ERP, and that all it is for folks is a virtual sex session with a stranger, using WoW as the conduit. For some, I am sure this is the case, but for many, there is so much more depth and life to RP that doesn’t include any bodily fluids or naughty bits. If an ERPer will not take no for an answer, the solution is the same for a duel spammer, a non ERP Roleplayer, or harasser in the game. Report and ignore.

I hope my tips were helpful, and I would love to answer any other questions on Role Playing in the World of Warcraft. Email me or join Bella, Rho and myself in the All Things Azeroth live chat every Monday at 8 pm CST!

Welcome back! For the next 5 days or so I will be sharing an amazing journey with all of you. I will be opening up and showing you a side of me that many of you haven’t seen. Yes, that’s right, I’m getting personal. So grab a glass of noggenfogger, take a seat in your farm house, and enjoy Day 15: Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it.

I have been looking forward to this post since I first started the blogging challenge all those months ago. Yes I know, I was supposed to be done awhile ago but I like to take my time. Yes I know that I started this in February and it is now June 1st. Will you stop giving me a hard time? A lot of stuff has been happening in my life lately.

My desktop background has been the same since right before the launch of Mists of Pandaria. It is a beautiful piece of art that I found one day while searching the internet for a new background image.

Behold my dear readers! This is the background that I get to see every single day!! It has taken iconic images from all of the World of Warcraft expansions and squished them into one magnificent work of art! I have two words to say about this. HOT DAMN!!!

Now readers, I want to know what background image you’re rocking. Share them in the comments below.

Stay tuned tomorrow soon for Day 16: Things that you miss (post Cataclysm) where I will share with you all the things that I miss after the world broke during the Cataclysm.

Have a WoWtastic Week!!

So previously I talked about the artificial gear acceleration we are currently experiencing. Today I’d like to discuss a major force in that acceleration…the bonus roll.

So, for those of you who don’t raid, there is a bonus roll system implemented into all LFR, normal and heroic raids. Basically you can earn these special coins that allow you to have a free second roll on a boss if your loot didn’t drop. You can hold a limit of 10 coins at any one time and only earn 3 a week. I suspect that the 3-a-week limit is Blizzards’ way of keeping the acceleration in check, too many bonus rolls and we stand to move too fast through a tier, then we have the cataclysm issue where the tier was done and people complained there was “nothing to do.” On the flip side, if you don’t award enough coins people would wonder if it was truly worth it to spend so much time pet battling or running dailies to earn lesser charms.

That being said, I’ve seen some unusual comments regarding bonus rolls of late. Most go along the lines of how it just gives you gold and nothing else. There are similar comments about the “fail bags” in LFR.

I must say…I always found these comments strange until recently… a person on twitter asked me for my take on the bags…and it while describing my perspective that I realized… I was seeing this loot situation as a mathematician…not as a player.

So here’s my take:
When you kill a normal or heroic boss there’s a chance for loot to drop, sometimes you get loot you can use…sometimes you don’t. Here are the situations where you may not get gear:

Nothing drops that you can use for your spec/class (plate for a mail wearer)

Usable loot drops but is better for another spec in your raid (spirit cloth for a shadow priest)

Loot drops you can use but you lose the roll to someone else.

Basically even with a regular team…you don’t always see drops. Like wise when I see gold or a bag drop from LFR or a bonus roll…I see it the same as downing a regular boss and either not having suitable loot drop or not winning the roll…but hey…at least I got some gold out of it.

Around the middle and end of Cataclysm, it was discovered that Dev discussions regarding the idea of a “gear crunch” were circulating. In brief the main idea behind this “crunch” was to scale the stats on gear to artificially bring down player healing and damage numbers. The ultimate aim was to attempt to decrease the overall “numbers” that a player put out when going from levels 60 to 70, 70 to 80 and 80 to 90 respectively. The reason cited by Blizzard was that as numbers got higher and higher, the data that needed to be processed by the servers would continue to increase at a drastic rate. Ultimately it was decided that the servers Blizzard had could cope and the idea was not brought up again.

Now, we’ve possibly seen an early test of this gear crunch in the form of iLvl scaling, in Challenge modes and soon in Battlegrounds. As Blizzard scales the iLvl on gear, it also has a direct effect on our damage or healing. It’s allowed them to extend content such as challenge modes and gave them greater control over the whole PvE/PvP debate. So it seems like they are working towards a gear/iLvl crunch of some sort…but there’s one thing that says otherwise…The loot system in MoP…let me explain:

Artificial iLvl acceleration
In the course of a raid tier, a raider can gear in a few ways:

Valor items

Running raids

Running LFR

Running world bosses

Buying/crafting gear

Bonus for rolls

Now, of these 6 things, 3 will eventually result in gear outside of the normal raid boss drops (if you consider world bosses the same as normal raid bosses).

In terms of iLvl, Tier 15 LFR gear is roughly on par or better (stats wise) then heroic Tier 14 gear. This means that a new alt can gear up fast through LFR and has almost no reason to do tier 14 content once they reach iLvl 480.

Valor items are basically used as filler for gear slots. If you can’t find a suitable item in your raids, you can fill that gap with a valor item. And of course Bonus rolls give you a second shot at gear from a boss. Three or more times a week.

What does this all mean? In short, characters are gearing up extremely fast. Now this is by no means bad, in fact I suspect the reason Blizzard implemented the bonus roll system was do we spent less time on farm bosses and pushed forward quicker. This was to compensate for the shorter time we’d be spending on each tier.

So we’re gearing faster…so what… Well…given the iLvl jump from tier 14 to 15, it is significant…especially when we consider that it wasn’t all that long ago Blizzard was talking about a gear crunch. We already have top players in the world pulling close to 1-million crit damage in raids and we’re not even onto the last tier of the expansion.

Why the Dev would do such a total 180 on this…I don’t know, all I can say for now is the numbers are gonna get bigger and more ludicrous…hang onto your hats.

On a personal note…as a lock. I have come to the decision that while I know there are a lot of elitists out there that like to throw it in people’s faces when it comes to the green fire quest, and while I do think the quest is too hard, I don’t think it’s too hard for the same reasons.

Yes I have yet to complete the final boss. But that’s not why I think it’s too hard. I think the final boss is too difficult for the reward being offered. In Cata, rogues got their own quest, and what did they get in return, aside from some cool lore? LEGENDARY WEAPONS. Us locks have to defeat one of the most difficult bosses ever to grace the entire game and all we get in return is a cosmetic effect.

A little unbalanced in my opinion. One day I’ll beat him, when I have nothing better to do, but it’s not something that I am going to spend multiple thousands of gold in repairs on when I’ve lived without it for so long anyway. If the motivation was a bit more worthwhile, say a legendary item, then the story might be different.